State of Mind ~ Sense of Place ~ Genius Loci

The Eye and Heart of Vivian Maier

I’VE WRITTEN previously about Vivian Maier, a nanny who was also, by turns, prodigious and poetic photographic chronicler of mid-century street life in Chicago. As the story goes, Maier lost her images, which she’d kept in a rented storage locker, after she couldn’t come up with the payment. She died in 2009 at the age of 83. Serendipitously, a man named John Maloof, who had been working on a history of the neighborhood, happened upon the images and then set to the task of cataloging and chronicling.

I was happy to see last week that powerHouse books is publishing a collection of her work, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer this Fall with a forward by Geoff Dyer. These folks do solid work. Among one of my favorites is a lush collection of images by photographer Phil Stern. It chronicles the breadth of his career, work documenting the WWII battlefield, Hollywood and L.A. West Coast Jazz scene. I met and wrote about Stern some years back for the Times. He is delightful and a wonderful storyteller both face-to-face and in the frame.

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